Living on Straight Commission

I operate a small business and the Covid restrictions have had a devastating effect on this vulnerable business sector. I essentially work on “straight commission”. Saint Joseph, with his carpenter’s shop, in Nazareth, was in the small business, straight commission niche. He knew what it was like to be forced to temporarily shutter his business because of government policy, in his case the census. Not only that, he was compelled to take his wife, Mary, at a vulnerable time in her pregnancy, and make the perilous journey to Bethlehem only to have the privilege of discovering that there was no room in the inn. That first Christmas night, it was the shepherds, who lived at the bottom of society’s privilege pyramid, who were the witnesses to the Blessed event. Fittingly, it was Mary Magdalene who was the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection who, being a woman, was vulnerable to the social exclusions, of first century culture.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus makes the point that worldly privilege is not all that it’s cracked up to be. When he encountered the religious leaders, who were in the business of relishing in the richness of their ethnic privilege, as being “sons of Abraham”, Jesus had a few things to say to them. That the entry into the Kingdom is not a gate that you breeze through with your buddies it is more like the squeezing of a solitary soul through the “eye of a needle”, it is the spiritual posture of being on “straight commission”. Jesus makes it personal: “Who do you say that I am?”, “You must be born again”. At one level, the spiritual life is a vulnerable and solitary journey. The baggage of the various forms of privilege: cultural, religious, or economic just weigh us down. Jesus says, in Luke 6:20, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” and Paul, in Philippians 2:12, points out that you have “to work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, which is the mindset of someone on “straight commission”.

This year, as we make up our Christmas wish lists, perhaps we should step out and request that God put our personal vulnerabilities to good use. As a currency, in the Kingdom, they can be a gift that keeps on giving.

Blog image credit: A an etching by Jan Luyken from the Phillip Medhurst Collection of Bible illustrations housed at Belgrave Hall, Leicester, England (The Kevin Victor Freestone Bequest). Photo by Philip De Vere.